Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 42, Baal Wolf and other Viking ancestors.

In this episode, we're going to explore the ancestors of the Vikings, and we're going

to examine a period of northern European history which has relatively few reliable sources

and a lot of mythology.

So we're going to try to distinguish myth from reality as much as we can.

This place and time period also coincides with the setting of Baal Wolf, and since Baal Wolf

was likely composed during or shortly after this period of Scandinavian history, it's

one of the few somewhat contemporary accounts of the people of that region.

So we're going to see what information Baal Wolf can tell us about this history as well.

Now let me begin by explaining why this is a good time to turn our attention to Scandinavia.

In our overall story of English, we're somewhere in the middle 700s, so we're basically

halfway through the Anglo-Saxon period.

The period in the mid-700s is significant because it marks a brief period of time after

the church arrived, but before the Vikings began to arrive.

The Viking invasions really began to earnest at the very end of the 700s and lasted for

several centuries.

When they arrived, the Vikings looted, robbed, killed, and plundered.

And eventually they began to settle in large portions of Britain, and with that settlement,

a large portion of eastern and northern Britain called the Dane Law passed into the control

of the Danes, and the Old Norse language of the Danes began to find a home in Britain.

But just as English was assimilating the influences of Old Norse, the Normans arrived from

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